Robert Rosen > Quotes

“Ideas do not have to be correct in order to be good; its only necessary that, if they do fail, they do so in an interesting way. ”
― Robert Rosen

“For the next 16 hours, fueled by coffee and amphetamines, I wrestled with John Lennon's scrawls and codes and symbols. As I transcribed his words, I said them out loud like an incantation, and I began to feel Lennon's energy flowing through me.”
― Robert Rosen, Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon

“The essence of an open system is, as we have seen, the necessity to invoke an “outside,” or an environment, in order to understand what is going on “inside.” That is, we must go to a larger system, and not to smaller ones, to account for what an open system is doing. That is why reductionism, or analysis, that only permits us to devolve system behavior upon subsystem behaviors, fails for open systems.”
― Robert Rosen, Essays on Life Itself

“Yeah, we all hated the Nazis, and if anybody didn't, he kept his fool mouth shut about it. Because if you lived in Flatbush, you were surrounded by Jews. And Jews, having paid the price in blood, now owned the Nazis outright, and we could do anything we wanted to them.”
― Robert Rosen, Bobby In Naziland: A Tale of Flatbush

“Why did I become a professional pornographer? What can I say? I needed a job, a job was offered to me, and I took it.”
― Robert Rosen, Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography